On 5/25/11 12:32 PM, "Dan Mathews" <dmath...@duncansolutions.com> wrote:
>We are beginning this investigation as well. Of particular interest is >the ability to wipe corporate email from any device with/without >affecting personal settings. I know there is talk of BES supporting >other devices in the future, but we are looking at stepping away from >the expense of BES in general for many of our users. > >We have always supported the notion that one platform is easier to >support, but if we move away from that, it would be to a standpoint of >providing access to email, calendar, contacts, but not much more than >that. > >I am interested to see where this conversation will go... I tested MaaS360 from Fiberlink, and Air Watch. I liked the SaaS solutions rather than hosting one or two additional servers, building and maintaining updates. There is a connector between the vendor's server. It is small. I put it on the server hosting our BES. They were very comparable. The interface was a bit different, but the capabilities about the same. For MaaS360, the pricing per user was more expensive, but support is free. The support is out of Blue Bell, PA -- a bicycle ride from my home -- and very good. Air Watch was cheaper per user, but any premium support was extra. I did not have occasion during the test to try the support. Both solutions require you to obtain an enterprise developer's license from Apple at the cost of $299/year in order to get Apple's permission to access their APIs for management. We went with MaaS360, mostly based on support. I have been using it for about 6 weeks and like it a lot. As a user, I prefer Android, but as an administrator, there is a lot more control with iOS. Activations are almost as easy as BES OTA activations. Policies are reasonably granular. One of the benefits or iOS for administrators is the users' and carriers' inability to customize them significantly. With important apps standardized management becomes easier. Android requires an app to be installed free from the Market. You can push email configurations with the Touchdown exchange client. It's a paid app, but both vendor plan to offer discounted or free branded versions of touchdown. Both allow password locking, selective and full wipes. Both offer phone location services via the GPS radio. Both have a quarantine feature to prevent users from doing their own unmanaged configurations. You can also block a device. Both leave plenty of room for wish lists. No carrier data plan surcharges like the BB Enterprise Data Plan. -- Art Alexion Systems Engineer -- Infrastructure Engineering Group Resources for Human Development _______________________________________________ Bes-Admins mailing list Bes-Admins@dataoutages.com http://www.dataoutages.com/mailman/listinfo/bes-admins http://www.dataoutages.com http://www.dataoutagenews.com RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Bes-admins --------------------------------- Bes-Admins mailing list is sponsored by Dataoutagenews.com. http://www.dataoutagenews.com
